What I know for sure is this: we come from mystery, and we return to mystery.”
Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything p. 16
I sit here in a place I love, a place that only nine days ago was foreign to me. I look out the window here, feeling strangely at home at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota. The window looks out over moving water with branches above. This little nook can, if the light reflects just right, feel like an intimate light show with patterns dancing on the water’s surface.
Compared to the liveliness of this little space just two days ago, the water is darker, a reflection of me. I am sad to leave. I tried to drive off this morning once but turned back.
My time here has been personal, spiritual, and professional all at once, like these branches of me got to come together and have a party. Coming to the institute, I was spun up, wanting to somehow unify all these sides of me. Writer, teacher mom, church, college, school, home. Where is the through-line? I’ve often wondered. Where is the me-est me? How do I find her?
One of my big take-aways from this week is that even though I am this one person, there are so many facets to me. So often I’m trying to put them together into one grand-unified-field-theory for Evi, and say this-this is who I am! But when instead I honor the many voices, the many parts that make me up, my writing comes fast, the voice sings in different ways, and I find myself laughing in the writing, crying amazed at how there’s a grace to re-telling your stories and saying, what was that all about?
It’s a lesson I’ll treasure forever from my time here. So as I sit here by the tree window on my last day at the table, I’m slowing, my steps and also my spirit. What a grace it’s been to feel at home for a week in Minnesota among thinky, kind, whip-smart, funny writers. This week has dared me to say, “What if all of this is me? What if all of this is home? What if God is busy at work in all of it creating, making space, and asking us to dance?” A friend I met at the institute quotes John Coltrane in his (my writer friend’s) book about music. “It all has to do with it,” Coltrane says, speaking of the higher power bubbling up in and through everything. This week I’ve been in “it,” if that makes sense. Speeding up even as I slow down, knowing that this, even this facet of the life we get to play in is pure gift.
I’m thankful for Collegeville, for my coach, Michael McGregor, grateful for my mom and Ralph for taking good care of my kiddos, and thankful I just said “Why not?” and submitted my application to Colegeville one more time. Just a year ago I posted on Facebook how I had been denied again on my Collegeville application. “I’m hungry for some Writing and Community in 2021,” I posted. I guess we make our plans and the timing, well that’s another thing. And yet, the timing has worked out poetic, as I know this summer, this one was when I was ready for the intensity, for the high standard, and for the challenge that has been Collegeville. Cheers to that.
“When we see a Cezanne, we feel what he saw in the landscape, and that opens up the possibility of his sensitivity to the world being awakened in us.” – Michael McGregor, Pure Act
gratitude gal 